The reported death of old-time Sydney crim ''Nervous'' Norm Beves has provoked my nostalgia gland. According to the SMH : Nervous Norm's criminal ineptitude was so legendary that for years ''Norm's form'' was used as the case study on recidivism for police officers studying to...
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" Enormous Penis Located on Google Maps ". Last time I checked, Gawker's illustrated story about the huge penises drawn on school lawns in New Zealand had racked up over 46,000 views. A more recently posted story tells of how "A man in Russia broke into a hair salon and the ow...
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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation - upon which I came clean on in a recent thread . Troppo is really an 'eyeballs' play as we say in the trade and things haven't been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way...
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Furry Fandom: Anthrocon is the world's largest convention for people fascinated with humanlike animal characters. Held in Pittsburgh, the 2011 convention attracted more than 4,500 'furries' , some of them dressed as their favourite characters. Canadian blogger and fantasy auth...
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AirBnb is a great startup which uses the power of the net to facilitate home sharing. When travelling, rather than stay in a hotel, you pay to stay in someone's home - someone who's somewhere else enjoying the scenery in someone else's home. There are optimists and pessimists...
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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media "a battle with cancer". Cancer won as it so often does. Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard...
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Skype spamming seems to be on the up and up. I had about six people yesterday telling me they wanted me to add them to their contacts. I just got my second today. When I tell them I'm busy, they all seem fine with that, and don't keep bugging me - or most don't. But most want...
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A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I'd buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews . Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt's advice on the thread a...
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(cross-posted at Core-econ) Whilst it is fairly clear that the current climate change policies of Australia and other countries will do next to nothing to avert climate change (see here for a latest update on the debate), there is a key element particular to Australia that has...
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Now that my days of writing and blogging are over, I am spending my time reading books. I have almost finished reading John Howard’s book on Lazarus Rising, which is easy to read and generally quite enjoyable (although at times self-righteous). One thing about the book struck...
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Krugman again : Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans tha...
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The right wing think tanks have been having a ball denouncing dreadful things like fiscal stimuli which saved a good hundred thousand odd jobs in Australia. Meanwhile New Matilda carries a story about life in Ladakh: Sun-drenched images of rural life in Ladakh in the 1970s whe...
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From the Atlantic Monthly . Paul Keating's line comes to mind. "Where do you people get off?"
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If it had happened in the US it is inconceivable that a great deal of the emphasis would not have been on Justice for the Killer. "We'll hunt him down . . . " Well no hunting down required in this case but you get my drift. I can't recall what we said about it in Bali, but we'...
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The COAG Reform Council wanted some lateral thinking done about cities - so who you gonna call? Being Dr Lateral can be a bit tedious from time to time. You know, spending all that time outside the square. What's wrong with being inside squares anyway? But like those birds ins...
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Around the blogosphere and the media people are trying to make sense of the bombing and massacre in Norway. At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch offers some advice : I think there is a duty to analyse why these things happen, and why they are talked about in the way they are, but...
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When best selling German author Thilo Sarrazin arrives in Australia for the Centre for Independent Studies Big Ideas Forum his hosts will promote him as a courageous opponent of political correctness while his critics will denounce him as a racist. Sarrazin's 2010 book Deutsch...
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Don't post crap! Troppo readers were up in arms about Rafe Champion's post on the Monckton and Dennis climate change debate . Rafe wants to know "how the warming lobby and Greens managed to inflate a possible temperature increase of a degree or two over the next century into t...
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As ABC 7:30 highlighted last night , it appears that the Gillard government is about to formally sign the deal with Malaysia that will see boat-arriving asylum seekers returned to the back of the queue in that country without processing. Assuming that UNHCR accepts it (apparen...
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Fisking is "the practice of savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet (named after Robert Fisk of The Independent)" who was a victim. A verbal equivalent of the process was demonstrated last night by Christopher Monckton. Per...
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Which isn't to complain. He gives a great speech. [ted id=1190]
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If anyone wants to come to an event put on by the Australian Business Foundation and Deloitte, on the new R&D Tax Credit - they can come along to an event in Melbourne this Friday. Details are below the fold. The new R&D: the future of innovation and development in Australian...
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Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I'm about ready to concede it's not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with...
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I don't know much about this picture except that it seems to be begging to have a caption competition about it. And here at Troppo, we're never afraid of a challenge. Nothing is too serious to trivialise. So please supply us with a caption. The winner of the comp will be flown...
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A major component of the government’s clean energy plan is a package of assistance measures to compensate households for higher prices. The government will provide assistance through increases in pensions, allowances and family payments, as well as through income tax cuts. Fro...
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At #76 on the Things Bogans Like list , McMansions are a symbol of the culture of overconsumption and a triumph of marketing over common sense. Built on the urban fringe, kilometers away from services and public transport, McMansion owners are doomed to spend hours in their ca...
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. . . [T]here has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy. A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are be...
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Disclaimer: This ended up roughly 4500 words longer than I expected when I sat down. A while ago, following the start of the Arab Spring, John Quiggin wrote a post declaring " Fukuyama, F*** Yeah ". Apart from showcasing an appreciation of both late 20th century political thou...
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In this week's Missing Link Friday: inequality, McMansions, education, brown coal and flaming kittens. Inequality: Why don't Australians complain more about wealth inequality? According to David Neal at The Conversation it's because most of us underestimate how unequal the dis...
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In an earlier post , and one of a series by me and subsequently Ken as well, I suggested that an important part of any professional education should be a kind of counter-narrative in which those who learn a profession are also made familiar with that profession's cognitive bia...
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Cross posted from Australian Policy Online http://inside.org.au/how-fair-is-australia%e2%80%99s-welfare-state/ IN ITS 28 May edition the Economist carried a long feature about Australia, praising our resilient economy, criticising the quality of our political discourse, and hi...
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Peter Roebuck, the Fairfax cricket writer, has joined Mike Atherton in suggesting a boycott of Sri Lanka . For England that means next year; for Australia, next month. It's good to see that someone outside the cloisters of human rights activism is prepared to make a stand agai...
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I reckon this is the most succinct, accurate and balanced summary I've read of the current state of the carbon pricing debate: Pricing carbon in Australia is about pricing carbon, not saving the planet. As an insurance policy, we need to have a soft mechanism in place that can...
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No Kidding. They're making a movie of Franz Stampfl's life - a doco. Who was Franz Stampfl I hear you cry? Wikipedia says this: Stampfl was born in the capital of then Austro-Hungarian Empire . He was the son of an Austrian general. He studied writing and painting in school. A...
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From Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity, by Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, Journal of Urban Economics 69 (2011) 165–181 Researchers have linked the rise in obesity to technological progress reducing the opportunity...
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You'll be pleased to hear that the Mortgage Industry Association of Australia is on a campaign to ramp up the qualifications of mortgage brokers. Just because all they do is sell loans and fill out forms - and otherwise manage the process by which you apply for a loan - is no...
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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGcfqj04Qk&feature=related Last night Jen prevailed on me to watch an episode of the doco series The First Australians . Such programs tend towards the irritatingly sanctimonious and question-begging in my experience, and that may well be true o...
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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin . "Now the best they can hope for is ' extending opportunity '." Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley , Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party s...
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Joshua Gans can't imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ' nesters '. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners." And, as...
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